...For anyone who was a regular reader of Le Monde in the summer of 2001, to find such sentiments expressed in its pages will have come as no surprise. What came as a surprise was to find Jean-Marie Colombani suddenly counting himself, as well apparently as all the French if not indeed all the world, somehow part of a nation that his paper made a habitual practice of vilifying. Indeed, the very expression "the Americans" has long been used in Le Monde as a metonym to speak, for instance, of the American government or American corporations, thus suggesting, given the normally accusatory context, a sort of collective national guilt.

In the weeks leading up to the 9/11 attacks, Le Monde had embarked on a veritable campaign of incitement against the United States, complete with editorial cartoons on an almost daily basis that would not have been out of place in the most rabidly anti-American specimens of the Arab press. The July 2001 Group of Eight meetings in Genoa, Italy, provided the occasion for a front-page offering of dubious taste by the paper's lead cartoonist, Plantu. It shows George W. Bush, protesters in the background, giving orders to seven figures, representing the other participating nations, who are variously depicted as bound, gagged, and blindfolded by American flags or impaled through a variety of orifices upon the flagpoles bearing them. "Tell these kids to stop the violence!" Mr. Bush demands.

An article on the "antiglobalization" movement Attac in the edition of Aug. 28, 2001, was accompanied by a cartoon by Plantu's colleague Serguei. In it, the world is depicted as the body of a living piggy-bank sporting an Uncle Sam hat and a stubbly beard and with a fat cigar embossed by a dollar sign stuck between its teeth. A small dark figure, evidently the dispossessed of the earth, holds out its hand pathetically. Another offering by Serguei from August, this one accompanying an article on Henry Kissinger and Chile, depicts Uncle Sam with a death's head, glowering at a globe dripping in blood. In his right hand, the Uncle Sam figure clutches the cigar with the dollar sign on it: the icon of American cupidity.

The 9/11 attacks did nothing to curb this onslaught. On the contrary, they only seemed to inflect the rising curve of animosity more sharply upward. In the weeks and months that followed, Le Monde would return with mind-numbing regularity to the theme of American guilt in connection with 9/11, typically leaving it to third parties to say openly in its pages what its publisher in his "All Americans" piece had merely insinuated or stated as conjecture...